Python：startswith() 未按预期工作

Question

I am writing a program that loads an external txt file of movies. This part works fine. I then have a function that searches a list of movies generated from the file. The function should print out all movies that start with the search string.

def startsWithSearch(movieList):

    searchString = input("Enter search string: ")

    for movie in movieList:
        if(movie.startswith(searchString) == True):
        print(movie)

However, no movies are printed when I enter a search string, even though there are movies in the list that start with that string.

Answer 1

if given correct input data your function does work as expected:

def startsWithSearch(movieList):

    searchString = "test4"

    for movie in movieList:
        if(movie.startswith(searchString)):
            print(movie)


startsWithSearch(["test1","testnomatch","test4","test4should","not_test4"])

output is:

test4
test4should

so all correct... must be your input data

i know you want a StartsWith solution as your function name says, but actually searching for movies, it is a lot more convenient, if you find any match inside the string, so if i search for "mentalist" i will find "the mentalist", then you could just use:

if searchString in movie:
    print(movie)

And as suggested by Anna to ignore case:

if searchString.lower() in movie.lower():

or even fancier with regular expressions (need import re at first line):

if re.match(".*" + searchString,movie,re.I):

or if you really just want match on beginning of name:

if re.match(searchString,movie,re.I):

that should be enough alternatives :)

Answer 2

I would think it might be that the input() function is returning with a new line at the end. Try adding searchString = searchString.strip() after collecting the input data. Also you might want to try converting both to lower case before comparing.

Also the line if(movie.startswith(searchString) == True): can just be written as if movie.startswith(searchString):

Answer 3

I had same problem when I was reading from files. startswith was failing due to newline character which was read from file. Use rstrip() to remove newline character from both strings before you use startswith function.